One semester down…
…at least four more to go. For the Masters at least. All in all it’s been a successful fall. I have read more theory in the last four months then I have in the last four years, I have written almost 30,000 words of academic writing, and I have managed to learn the basics of programming along the way. Here’s a quick rundown of the final papers and projects from Fall 2006:
IAT 800 - Foundations of Computational Art and Design
Heavy on the computation, and light on the art and design, this class succeeded in teaching me the basics of JAVA, and some elementary data structures. For my final project, I created a rudimentary user model, that attempted to sort users into different class categories, based on their answers to quiz questions themed around the geek RPG that Karen and I created in 2003. You can poke it here.
IAT 810 - New Media
One of the core courses at SIAT and easily the best class I’ve taken since…probably ever. Readings were fascinating,and foundational, class discussion was challenging and stimulating, and the final paper was about a video game. For the paper, I did a close reading of the opening sequence of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The final result was appallingly cumbersome (12,500 words), and included a horrific spreadsheet upon which my data was gathered. Although I did receive an A, I will be rewriting this into something less cumbersome in the next few weeks. In the meantime, feel free to read the monster.
Player Character Identity and Choice in the Elder Scrolls Oblivion
Tables, Figures, and Data.(Almost 3mb - You have been warned)
IAT 887 - Post Traditional Media
This class was a special topics/research methods course focusing on the pet theories of the professor teaching it. His goal in the course was to explore an epistemological framework that he was developing as an alternative to postmodernism. What can I say, the guy is a “loose cannon” in the world of academia! The final for this course was to write a paper that explored his Post Traditional Framework while also taking some time to connect itself with one of the qualitative methodologies that were discussed over the course of the semester. I decided to write a paper looking at the history of the superhero in western culture, and to draw parallels between the history of comics and the paradigms of western thought. This paper also ended up being overly long, and could easily be broken into two papers…one about the postmodern movement in comics, and one about the idea of living traditions and post traditional epistemology in comics. For now, though, its just this big thing.
Living Traditions in the Work of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore: How Comic Books can inform Postmodern Epistemology
That pretty much wraps up what I’ve been working on this semester. Hopefully I will find time to trim and revise these papers in the early weeks of the Spring semester. I’ll be sure to post final drafts when I’ve got them. Cheers for now.